When Prince Harry stirred up a fuss by wearing Nazi uniform to a fancy-dress party he found a gallant defender in Paul Johnson who wrote that ‘in treating Nazi insignia as a party joke’ the young prince ‘reflects the instincts of his generation’. ‘The Nazis,’ he added, ‘do have an undoubted fascination for many young people’, because of their style, not their ideology. ‘Hitler still exerts some of the dread appeal he exercised in his lifetime … A lot of his appeal, I suspect, is visual. Hitler was a kind of artist’ who ‘put his artistic and inventive instincts to work’.
This is surely undeniable, and Johnson is by no means the first to remark it. Thomas Mann was there before him. In 1938, by then exiled from Germany, he wrote an essay entitled ‘Brother Hitler’. ‘The fellow is a catastrophe; that is no reason to find him uninteresting as character and destiny,’ he loftily declared. But what sort of interest? The essay’s title is significant. Mann, the great novelist, the correct bourgeois family man, pillar of public rectitude, recognises his kinship with the catastrophic fellow, with ‘this unqualified, impossible man . . . this rejected Bohemian artist’.
Rejected indeed, failing even to gain admittance to the Vienna Academy of Arts, getting no further than peddling his little postcards round the coffee houses. In contrast, Mann’s success came early; he was only 25 when Buddenbrooks was published. And yet in his eyes they are brothers. He himself was not only the respectable son of the Lübeck patriciate; he was also the artist whose inclination was towards homo- eroticism which he associated with aesthetics and death. ‘That all artistic genius inclines in that direction, tends towards the abyss is all too certain,’ he wrote.
There was an element in him which identified with the Bohemian failure. Why not? The finest novel is an imperfect realisation of what the author envisaged. He saw in Hitler the type of the unsuccessful artist, the layabout — what, had the wheel turned differently, he might have been himself: ‘basically arrogant, with his basically I’m-too-good-for-that rejection of any rational and reputable activity.’ And what was the basis of this? Why, the artist’s assumption that he was reserved for something special, ‘entirely indefinable’. He recognised in Hitler, and in himself, ‘the dream of seeing a world lost in fear, love, admiration, shame, at the feet of the once-spurned man’ — the dream of nights in the garret or doss-house.
Hitler is first the rejected artist, always believing himself misunderstood, therefore full of resentment. The type is common. But he finds another art he can excel in: the art of rhetoric. Yet even in power the artist-Führer, like the successful novelist Mann, can never be satisfied. There is still ‘the insatiability of the drive for compensation and self-glorification’; also ‘the feeling of futility as soon as there is nothing to do’ — the novel finished, the great speech made — and then there is ‘the insomniac force of always having to prove oneself again’. Mann’s biographer, Hermann Kurzke, writes, ‘The will to power gives impetus to the practice of art as it does to politics.’
‘There is a lot of “Hitler” in Wagner,’ Mann wrote (after the war). Not ‘Wagner’ in Hitler; that’s commonplace, but ‘Hitler’ in Wagner: a much keener observation. What is it that he sees? The determination to go beyond what has been achieved before? Perhaps. What Matthew Arnold called ‘Titanism’? That too, I should say. But also Mann observed that for Hitler ‘to stand Wagner-like, on the doorstep of ruination, is everything’. And he wrote that in 1938 before the Nazis’ own Götterdämmerung. Mann recognised in this catastrophic brother the magnetic attraction towards disaster. Borges saw it too, remarking on the ‘unreality’ of Nazism, on the will to destruction, since nobody, not even Hitler, he thought, ‘in the intimacy of his soul’ truly wishes Hell to triumph.
Yet Hell has its sinister glamour, for the Romantic artist as for adolescents. Mann knew this, explored it in Dr Faustus, his profound, disturbing reflection on the German catastrophe. ‘It is precisely Hitler’s gifts,’ Paul Johnson wrote, which make him so dangerous and so uniquely evil.’ The fellow was a catastrophe undoubtedly. What would he have been if the Vienna Academy had accepted and trained him and he had made a living as a second-rate landscape painter? Cream-cake-eating darling of a coterie of ladies in a provincial town? Perhaps.
Comments